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Tuesday, August 23, 2011

LibreOffice replaces OpenOffice

Many genealogists have used OpenOffice as an alternative to purchasing an expensive office suite for word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software. However, OpenOffice's sponsors have discontinued support for the product. The announcement by Oracle was made some time ago. Quoting from the announcement:

The group who left OpenOffice.org development founded a 'vendor-neutral' group, known as The Document Foundation. The Document Foundation then began to develop an alternative to OpenOffice, known as LibreOffice. Unsurprisingly, the software suite is free, and is based upon the OpenOffice source code. Ars Technica provides coverage of how Oracle intends to progress without the OOo software in its arsenal.

LibreOffice is the new alternative, although there are several other opensource programs available online. LibreOffice has adopted the OpenOffice format and has a word processing program, a spreadsheet, a presentation program, a drawing program, a database and comes with pre-made templates. LibreOffice recognizes and supports all of the OpenOffice file formats as well as a huge list of other file formats. I found no trouble at all opening .ods and .odt files.

I must admit that I had some stability issues with the OpenOffice program and had switched to Microsoft Office, but I am always looking for alternatives and LibreOffice appears to fit the bill. If you have OpenOffice on your computer, you need to know that the program will no longer be updated or supported. You may wish to consider switching to an alternative and LibreOffice is possibly that alternative.